A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

WILL LAWMAKERS KILL ENERGY INDEPENDENCE MOVES?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 11, 2014 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILL LAWMAKERS KILL ENERGY
INDEPENDENCE MOVES?”

Nothing is more important to
California’s large privately-owned utilities than the virtual monopolies they
enjoy in most of the state.

Those monopolies make it virtually
impossible for almost all businesses and residents outside cities with
municipal power companies to buy electricity from anyone but companies like
Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas &
Electric, also guaranteeing significant profits to those utilities in
perpetuity.

But the big energy companies feel
threatened these days by a movement toward energy independence now afoot from
Sonoma and Marin counties to big cities like San Francisco and San Diego. Moves
are also active in Alameda County and Lancaster.

Whether the independence efforts
succeed or not will depend in part on the fate of a proposed law now working
its way through the state Legislature, one that advocates of competition say
will surely kill their movement if it passes.

The proposal, Assembly Bill 2145,
looks innocuous on its surface: It would mandate an opt-in approach for
newly-independent electric arrangements known as community choice aggregations
(CCAs), rather than the opt-out setup on which every such plan in America has
been based.

So far, only two CCAs operate in
California, covering much of Marin and Sonoma counties. They buy power from
generators and sell it to local residents, transmitting the energy over the
power grid owned and operated by the big utilities. Customers still get bills
from the big firms, but part of what they pay goes to the CCAs, set up on votes
by city and county governments.

Organizers in Marin and Sonoma
counties say their customers are saving a minimum of 4 percent on monthly
bills, with some invoices reduced by about 6 percent. Net savings reported so
far: More than $4 million.

In each area with a CCA, existing
utility customers automatically get power from the new agency, unless they opt
out and go back to their former utility, which about 20 percent of Marin
customers have done. AB 2145 would flip that around, forcing CCAs to recruit
each of their customers.

“This would rob community choice
programs of the critical mass they need to get off the ground,” said San Diego
County supervisors Dianne Jacob and Dave Roberts in a recent essay. The two
want a CCA for the San Diego area. “This change would cripple the creation of
local initiatives and lock in an energy market that is rigged against
consumers,” they said.

AB 2145 sponsor Steven Bradford, a
Democratic assemblyman from Gardena and a former Southern California Edison
executive, argues that because most Californians have no idea what a CCA is,
the new agencies should be forced to market themselves. “These outfits need to
go into the community and convince people to join,” he said. “That is the
consumerist way to introduce competition.”

His argument is a “red herring,” says
Shawn Marshall, director of a pro-CCA group called LEAN Energy US, who helped
organize the Marin and Sonoma agencies. “We have no problem with reporting
all we do to the ratepayers. But Bradford and the utilities know opt-in is
a poison pill that would kill this entire concept.”

Bradford’s bill passed the Assembly in
May and is now before state Senate committees. It is the second utility-backed
effort of the last four years to kill CCAs.

The first was the failed 2010
Proposition 16, which sought to require a two-thirds vote for a local ballot
measure before any government could set up a CCA. PG&E invested more than
$40 million in that failed proposition, far exceeding what CCA backers spent.
Neither it nor the other big utilities want to become mere common carriers that
mainly supply transportation of power, rather than also providing the
electricity.

Bradford insists an opt-in system is
needed because most citizens are clueless about CCAs. The danger is that
because his fellow lawmakers are for the most part also uninformed, they will
pass AB 2145, leaving it up to Gov. Jerry Brown to sign or veto the measure,
which is strongly backed by labor unions which are big funders of his campaigns.

But if there is ever to be significant
energy competition in California, this bill must die, despite the consumerist
rhetoric in which Bradford carefully wraps it.

-30-
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book,
"The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the
Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover
fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.